Greetings Dear Ones!

There is something surreal about a cerulean sky on a September day. It’s a pure slice of heaven. It’s different from any other sky in any other month, though November can boast of Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” and I also personally adore February winter skies that look like heaps of ecru wool roving waiting to be spun into dreams of Spring. But September skies are my favorite. Their particular blue goes so well with the trees, which are yet green. Only a few golden leaves tinkle down, like coins into a collection box for the poor.

The days are just as warm and sunny, but the nights are made for snuggling into wooly socks, cozy blankets, with good books and warming mugs of cider. The sap starts to move in the trees, sinking to keep roots warm, just as we don boots after months of bare feet.

The harvest is nearly done. I have been making pepper jelly and peach preserves, canning them in neat little jars in neat little rows for those blustery months when we want to taste August again. This year, I had so many beans hanging from my bean trellis, I canned and pickled “dilly beans” with fresh dill and garlic and red pepper flakes. Yum!

The Blue Sky days are perfect for drying hay as my farmer friends get a second or third cutting out of the fields. I have been stuffing my barn with 400 (and still counting) forty-pound cubes of fodder for the animals, grateful to inhale the fragrance of dried grass and Security. There is only a narrow pathway for the barn cats to navigate the floor, but they prefer to climb amongst the jungle, happy to have so many places to creep and hide and stay hidden and warm. I deliberately build them little forts in the hay where I can sit with them and hide too.

The twine that binds the bales, cuts into my fingers, even with the gloves on, and I notice that my hands are thicker by the end of the day than they used to be. It happens every year. A good frost seems to slim them down again. I look at my strong brown hands and thank them for their good work. I ask so much of them in September—from hauling hay to hand-stitching lace on wedding dresses, and then trying to play a new fiddle tune in b minor just before bed...

The third and final fly season is almost over—and Gus and Otie are so much happier. We have the dreaded black flies all Spring; the deer flies, horn flies, and house flies all summer. The boys have developed big callouses on their bum cheeks from swishing at pests with their strong, bony tails. They roam among the fallen fruits of feral apple trees in their field, smiling and munching. They don’t mind the clouds of fruit flies. It’s the green heads, and the giant ones we call the B-52s, showing up in iridescent hues of bite and flight, that they hate. But on clear blue, breezy days—good hay-drying days—the flies are barely there.

The thistles are everywhere, looking gorgeous and dangerous in their push-up blossoms and glittering spikes. First their hair was purple, now it’s white, like a lot of people I know. Their seeds scatter down the hillside in the wind. They do not grow in the same spot twice. They send huge roots into the ground and heal it, binding nitrogen, as they march steadily across the field, year after year. Some people hate them. I love them. They are outrageous AND they are Menders. And no one wants to mess with them except the golden finches, who perch on them with dainty spurs and ride them expertly.

What could EVER go wrong on days like this???

Twenty-five years ago, we found out.

Out of a clear blue sky, hijacked planes came and hit not just our buildings and our people, but our hearts, changing everything forever. This year, because I have so much quiet working time to listen to podcasts and books on tape in my shop, I spent several days listening to survivor stories on the Tube of You. I had never done this before.

My family has its own survivor stories. My brother worked for Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower. His subway train had stopped before its usual stop and all the passengers were told to disembark, because the North Tower had already been hit. As he walked towards his building, he had almost made it in to work when he looked up and saw the second plane coming in. He felt the heat of the fireball, heard the screams, saw the jumpers. Suddenly, he was in a sea of thousands pouring towards the water, to the bridges, walking silently all the way back to New Jersey.

At the time, I was married to a wonderful Scotsman who had the incredible fortune, as he used to put it, “to drink for a living.” (Don’t worry, our friendship has survived our marriage!) He worked as a brand ambassador for several whisky distilleries and American importers of prestige versions of “barley sauce.” That morning, at 9:am, he was supposed to be doing staff training in preparation for an evening Scotch tasting event at the Windows on the World restaurant, located on the 106 and 107th floors of the North Tower. He had done multiple tastings there in the past. He argued with his colleagues about doing the 9:am staff training. “September 11th is my daughter’s fourth birthday. I’m not coming down the night before to do a staff training so early in the morning. I’ll be there at noon. There’s plenty of time to train the staff. They’ve done it all before. It’s really important for me to be there when she wakes up on her birthday.”

The morning of September 11th, while the sky was only just turning that magnificent blue, we had presents and songs, and we buttered her nose (a weird family birthday tradition to keep evil spirits away) all before a car arrived to take him to the airport. Hours later, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen, learning a new chord on my guitar when the call came from a pay phone at Logan. All flights were grounded. He was coming back home. “Turn on the news,” he said.

My daughter has grown up feeling that her birthday is both a day of mourning and rejoicing. Never has it been able to be “just another birthday…”

This year, the twenty-fifth anniversary, I finally was able to listen to all the stories…so many, many stories of heroism and terror, of tragedy and relief, of guilt and gratitude. I identify with it all. It was so cathartic to be patching crotches, hacking into bridesmaids’ bodices, and weeping.

I’m a professional Mender. For me, the best stories are the stories about September 12th, the day AFTER the hits, when all the helpers, healers, and huggers understood their assignments and got on with the business of Mending the Mess left by Hate. I remember it so strongly. I remember how we all loved each other. How American Flags sprang up, almost overnight, like red-white-and-blue mushrooms from every conceivable location you could imagine. I never saw anyone putting them up. Just suddenly, they were there. I remember the shock, the pain, and how scared we all were, but I remember the sense of Unity and Identity too. We suddenly “belonged” to something we had not really considered before—forged by shock, by sharing, by story, by memory—we suddenly Belonged. To each other. High above the borders of statehood, citizenship, nationality, in that vast cerulean sky, where two towers were lit like giant cigarettes, we belonged to the vast, human family, Grieving.

I remember how quiet the skies were that day, even after the cigarettes and so many precious lives were stubbed into ash. All the planes were grounded. There was no hum of an engine at ten thousand feet signaling that people high above us were patiently awaiting the arrival of the beverage trolley or their turn at a potty the size of a phone booth. (Who even knows what a phone booth is, these days?) There was just a vast Absence of noise. Those who could, went home and stayed there. The streets were quiet. It was a Silence I had never heard before that wove itself into a certain shade of blue I now recognize as a rare yet familiar friend. It’s a blue that is impossible to be sad in, despite the horrors we witnessed that day. It’s a Blue that says, “I am bigger than sorrow, bigger than grief.” Be HERE. Rejoice.

So now, blue skies (like today) echo that silence and that faith back to me across time. And finally, after listening to hours of people recounting their stories, a little family mystery is solved. I finally understand why I have a little habit I have developed.

I don’t know when I started doing this, but I am not alone. Perhaps you do it too? My entire family does it—my kids, my siblings, my parents. We do it unconsciously, yet it attracts the attention and surprise of those who don’t. When we hang up the phone, we say, “Bye, I love you.” It’s so reflexive that I accidentally say it to customers. I said it when I called the electric company about billing questions. I said it to the car mechanic when I called to make an appointment for an oil change. I have told it to mere acquaintances and shop assistants, always by mistake. I notice that my children say it as unconsciously as I do. It’s become a telephone reflex—kind of like saying “you too!” when someone says, “have a nice day.”

I don’t mean to release these little emotional grenades on the unsuspecting. I can only imagine the plumber hanging up from a call from me, “Bye! I love you!” and sitting there in stunned silence as he contemplates our “relationship.” Love is not love to me anymore; it’s mere punctuation, like ending a radio transmission with “K.” Do I love the guy who services my septic system? Well, of course I do. In a way… a very non-descript, global sort of way. But not enough to send him flowers or bake a cake for his birthday. Certainly not enough to tell him! Thank heavens none of these people ever call me back and demand answers.

“What did you say?”

“I said Goodbye.”

“No, you didn’t. You told me you loved me.”

“’I love you’ is how I say Goodbye.”

“Oh.”

And then, just to confuse him, I might add, “Thank you for calling Vermont Power and Light.”

Apparently, my nervous system has trouble distinguishing between family members and customer service. I’m so relieved when I accidentally say it to the guy at the feed store when I call to enquire about a grain delivery, and when I go to pick up the grain, neither of us make eye contact. New Englanders know how to handle intimacy.

The truth is, somewhere along the way, my heart got used to saying “I love you” as a default. And now, twenty-five years later, I realize why. Because so many people, when interviewed about their loss of a loved one during the terror attacks on 9/11 said, “I wish I had said I love you just one more time.” Those who were able to connect by phone, who were able to say “I love you” as the last thing they heard, clung to that. Somehow, I don’t know exactly who started it, but my family says it now, every time.

Bye! I love you!

Of course it means nothing. It also means everything. Especially out of a clear blue sky.

Yours aye,

Nancy